A Little Higher
There's an old saying: keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.
It means that when someone is dangerous, you keep them at your side—and never let your guard down.
I agreed with that proverb more than I cared to admit.
Honestly, just imagining Blueby cooking up some scheme somewhere I couldn't see was enough to set my nerves on edge.
We both shared the same desperate need to bulk up our standing, the same sense of urgency. In the end, we had to choose between cooperation and competition.
If I'd turned down her proposal, we would have spent our time as rivals, throwing every dirty trick in the book at each other just to keep the other in check.
And frankly, this was a critical period when simply growing was already more than enough work. I had no interest in getting my ankles tangled up by Blueby of all people and watching precious opportunities slip away.
Looked at another way, that path was mutual destruction.
There was another thought that crossed my mind, too.
Maybe this was a golden chance to dig into Blueby's past.
I'm already making approaches through Iruri. If I start cooperating with Blueby, it might get even easier to pull information out of her.
And hadn't Blueby said it herself first?
Let's use each other.
If she was aiming for the back of my head, I was more than ready to take a full swing of my own.
This is the rational call. There's a reason people talk about sleeping with the enemy.
It was a conclusion I could only reach because, since my regression, I still hadn't clashed with Blueby head-on. She'd needled Lucy a few times in ways that made my blood boil, but that was still within the range of things I could grit my teeth and let slide—for now.
More than that, though… how do I even explain what came next?
After I chose cooperation, Blueby called it a wise decision and offered to prove her usefulness first, as a way of building even a little "trust."
I had nothing to lose, so I accepted. Blueby quietly sent me a single file.
The moment I opened it, I nearly jumped out of my skin.
It was material on Subnitti and Miho—Discord chats under different nicknames from the ones they used now. Subnitti's was full of behind-the-back talk about other streamers. Miho's contained enough to estimate the age she was currently keeping secret from her viewers.
Nothing that would get anyone permanently banned, but depending on how you used it, you could easily turn either into a sensitive enough scandal. For someone who actually had relationships with both of them, the contents were enough to make my stomach drop.
When I pressed her on how she'd gotten it, Blueby mentioned a members-only site she'd been running in secret for a very long time—a place where "members" shared all kinds of useful information for mutual benefit.
The first thing that popped into my head was a secret society like the Freemasons. A shadowy cabal pulling the strings of the streaming world from behind the curtain.
Blueby snorted at my bristling reaction and told me I had an overactive imagination.
"It can be useful sometimes, but it's not that impressive. Just a bunch of small-time streamers who were scraping by to survive in this industry, trading info until the whole thing grew into something like a loose cell network. Honestly, most of the original members have already left the scene by now."
There was a distinctly lonely edge to Blueby's voice as she said it.
Of course, being a T-type myself, I tossed the melancholy aside and wanted to know whether they had anything on me or the rest of my crew.
"Nothing. I told you—it's not that big a deal. What I just gave you is everything. Those two at least have some history, so there's leftover material floating around here and there. You, Lucy, and that Mayo kid? Complete rookies."
The way she said it—like she'd already tried digging into us—sent a small chill down my spine. If that attempt had succeeded and she'd found some kind of leverage on me, she never would have come asking for a clean deal like this.
"Anyway, if you use that material well, it'll help. Consider it a gift. Put it to good use."
The intent behind Blueby's words was crystal clear.
Grab their weak points. Use them.
The faces of the old V-mellodi crew from before my regression floated up in my mind. I'd always thought they fell in line under Blueby's control a little too readily.
Had she been doing it like this the whole time—collecting people's secrets and holding them hostage?
Blueby didn't seem to feel the slightest twinge of conscience about using information this way. Listening to her talk about it almost proudly, she said members often showed up with dirt they'd collected on someone and traded it for whatever intel they needed in return.
Ah. So that was why intimate streamer gossip and Discord logs kept leaking onto the underground galleries every so often, sparking exposé wars. I'd always wondered where that kind of material even came from.
Blueby really was an onion of a person—peel back one layer and another completely new face appeared underneath. An onion with a vicious, spicy toxicity, at that.
From now on, I'd better be even more careful with Discord and KakaoTalk conversations.
Fundamentally, I wanted to trust my crew. But nobody ever knows how the world is going to turn.
And what if Blueby, the same way I was currently sounding out Iruri through my avatar-artist connections, decided to grab a weak point on someone around me and demand I dig up information for her?
The more I thought about it, the more certain I became that keeping Blueby close had been the right call. Leave a dangerous person like her unsupervised, and there was no telling what she'd pull.
"I'd like a little something in return myself. Business is give-and-take, after all. Anything's fine. Introduce me to a skilled avatar artist like last time, or even just a content collab wouldn't be bad."
The material on those two wasn't actually the kind of thing that helped me. But it had been more than enough to jolt my wariness of Blueby back to full alert.
If I want to keep that greed of hers satisfied, I should throw her at least one bone.
I thought it over carefully, then found myself leaning toward the "avatar artist" angle Blueby had just mentioned.
There was a well-known avatar creator who'd made a name for herself in the early days alongside Bebe-ttang. Someone I still kept in touch with for commissions whenever Bebe-ttang was too busy. At one point she'd been so good people nicknamed her the original "Kim Choco."
But I never, ever commissioned faces from this artist. Especially not original avatars—I wouldn't even discuss those with her.
Why?
Because right now she was famous for high-quality work, but come 2024, a scandal was going to explode. An original avatar she'd been paid well over ten million won for, and a plain customized ttu-tta avatar, had ended up looking like near-identical twins.
The galleries went absolutely insane. Even if they were by the same artist, people said, if an original and a ttu-tta look that alike, shouldn't she have to refund the money?
For a while it was trendy to play a self-deprecating guessing game with the two streamers' avatars—try to tell who was who. That was how stuck she was in her self-cloning style, until streamers finally turned their backs on her and the controversy buried her career.
I casually passed her contact info along to Blueby.
By 2024, Rabbit TV Korea would have already shut down its service. Our uncomfortable partnership wouldn't still be going by then. And I had all the excuses I needed. She was a hot artist right now—it's not like I could see the future, so how was I supposed to know she'd crash and burn a year later?
Right? Blueby might get suspicious, but she'd never find proof.
"Not bad. Let's keep working well together from here on out. Make sure we can both be useful to each other."
That had been the last thing Blueby said to me yesterday.
Hah. So I was going to have to keep making these nerve-shredding deals going forward?
The stress alone might shave a few years off my life.
Even so, it had been a deeply meaningful stretch of time. I felt like I'd finally gotten a little closer to the real Blueby—someone who'd only ever been a vague shape in the dark.
They say the blade you can't see in the dark is the most dangerous. Good. I'll use this as a stepping stone to get closer and closer to the truth.
If I cut ties completely, there was no telling what kind of schemes she'd start cooking. For now, this distance was the best I could manage.
Still, I wasn't just sitting here nursing a vague sense of dread. Blueby and I stood on opposite sides of almost everything—but there was one single truth we both understood down to the bone.
In the end, it's about weight class. Clumsy conspiracies and dirty tricks don't mean a thing if the gap in standing is overwhelming enough.
It wasn't just Pangea TV. The same went for Rabbit TV streamers. For anyone with even a moderate following and some years under their belt, a simple search would turn up posts about every incident and controversy they'd ever been involved in.
And had any of them gotten permanently banned?
Overseas gambling trips, crypto scams—you name it. A short period of self-reflection, then a perfectly clean return to streaming. That was the reality of this industry.
I'd said it a hundred times, and I'd say it again: in internet broadcasting, weight class was everything.
Blueby's betrayal? The constant anxiety that she might stab me in the back at any moment?
As long as I had a weight class solid enough to weather the hit, counterattacking was always on the table. Seol Pyo-woo and Elsa's case proved it—regardless of who was actually in the wrong, just the act of publicly sniping someone in the same industry was enough to whip up a backlash all on its own.
Streaming… I'd better work even harder.
Thinking about weight class naturally stoked my motivation. Things had been a little quiet since the car auction, sure. But from here on out, even if I stayed quiet, Rena World was about to get loud.
Park Bong-sik's long hiatus was almost over.
The streamer with the nickname "King" of Pangea TV. That weight class of his—pulling over thirty thousand viewers just by sitting there eating a meal—stirred up storms wherever it went.
Once Park Bong-sik comes back, a lot of the floating viewers drifting around will dry up. They'll mostly go watch the virtual streamers under Mu-yang Group. But does that mean there's nothing I can do about it?
Pangea TV was a platform where floating-viewer culture ran deep. When word got out that a stream was entertaining, people would sometimes abandon even their home channels and stampede over in a pack.
I'll just have to do everything I can.
A glimpse of Blueby's true face. Park Bong-sik's return.
Before I knew it, my eyes were already fixed on a future a little higher up.